Chapter 8: Conclusions – 5 More Tips for Better Fitness Tracking

Chapter 8: Conclusions – 5 More Tips for Better Fitness Tracking

And there you have it! Everything you possibly could need to know in order to start getting the best out of fitness tracking. Hopefully you’ve discovered some exciting new options you didn’t know about when it comes to tracking your health and hopefully you now know how to start getting more from your diet, from your runs, from your weightlifting and more. Once you fall into a system that works for you and start collecting the data that matters to your goals, you’ll be able to keep real tabs on what’s happening in your body, whether you’re losing weight and what you need to change in order to make positive progress.

Well, perhaps we haven’t covered everything. I’ll leave you with these five additional tips that can help you get even more from your tracking activities…

1 Choose Your Wrist

When you wear your tracker, make sure to tell it which wrist it is on. Most trackers have an option to do this and when you do, you’ll get more accurate readings based on more accurate knowledge about the movements coming in.

2 Use it to Stay Calm

Fitness tracking has been around long before the Fitbit and is actually a powerful medical tool used by doctors and GPs. In this context, fitness tracking and heart rate monitoring in particular, are used to provide something called ‘biofeedback’. Biofeedback basically means that you see information about your health such as your heartrate and/or blood pressure and thereby learn to identify certain symptoms in your body and even to control your heartrate.

Your fitness tracker thus can be used to help you improve your sense of calm. Keep an eye on your heartrate and focus on calming your mind. See if you can get your heartrate to slow down by thinking calm thoughts and concentrating.

3 Strengthen Your Brain Too!

Tracking is just for the body – it’s for the mind as well! You can use exercises to train and track things like your attention, memory and reactions with the dual n-back test, or programs like Lumosity or BrainHQ. You can even get ‘trackers’ that help you monitor things like your ability to concentrate. The ‘NeuroWave’ is one of the first commercial devices to offer EEG readings and works with a smart app.

4 Start Small

Another potential pitfall when starting out with fitness and health tracking is that you risk overloading yourself with data and information. Start small and build up!

5 Use Gamification

Gamification means turning an objective into a game. A classic example of this would be to challenge yourself to burn an extra calorie every day and to award yourself some kind of badge or medal on a chart each time you do. When you approach challenges like this, they become a lot more fun and the small rewards provide you with constant encouragement and feedback. Gamification goes perfectly hand-in-hand with fitness tracking!

Well, that’s enough theory to get you going – now comes the fun part: putting it into practice! Start tracking some small right now and build from there. You’ll be amazed at how it can transform your life and improve your fitness and health across the board.

And of course this is just the beginning, the future holds amazing things for fitness tracking!